Facebook has always “manipulated” the results shown in its users’ News Feeds by filtering and personalizing for relevance. But this weekend, the social giant seemed to cross a line, when it announced that it engineered emotional responses two years ago in an “emotional contagion” experiment, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

As a society, we haven’t fully established how we ought to think about data science in practice. It’s time to start hashing that out.

Before the Data Was Big…

Data by definition is something that is taken as “given,” but somehow we’ve taken for granted the terms under which we came to agree that fact. Once, the professional practice of “data science” was called business analytics. The field has now rebranded as a science in the context of buzzwordy “Big Data,” but unlike other scientific disciplines, most data scientists don’t work in academia. Instead, they’re employed in commercial or governmental settings.

The Facebook Data Science team is a prototypical data science operation. In the company’s own words, it collects, manages, and analyzes data to “drive informed decisions in areas critical to the success of the company, and conduct social science research of both internal and external interest.” Last year, for example, it studied self-censorship—when users input but do not post status updates. Facebook’s involvement with data research goes beyond its in-house team. The company is actively recruiting social scientists with the promise of conducting research on “recording social interaction in real time as it occurs completely naturally.” So what does it mean for Facebook to have a Core Data Science Team, describing their work—on their own product—as data science?

Contention about just what constitutes science has been around since the start of scientific practice. By claiming that what it does is data science, Facebook benefits from the imprimatur of an established body of knowledge. It looks objective, authoritative, and legitimate, built on the backs of the scientific method and peer review. Publishing in a prestigious journal, Facebook legitimizes its data collection and analysis activities by demonstrating their contribution to scientific discourse as if to say, “this is for the good of society.”

So it may be true that Facebook offers one of the largest samples of social and behavioral data ever compiled, but all of its studies—and this one, on social contagion—only describe things that happen on Facebook. The data is structured by Facebook, entered in a status update field created by Facebook, produced by users of Facebook, analyzed by Facebook researchers, with outputs that will affect Facebook’s future News Feed filters, all to build the business of Facebook. As research, it is an over-determined and completely constructed object of study, and its outputs are not generalizable.

Ultimately, Facebook has only learned something about Facebook.

The Wide World of Corporate Applied Science

For-profit companies have long conducted applied science research. But the reaction to this study seems to suggest there is something materially different in the way we perceive commercial data science research’s impacts. Why is that?

At GE or Boeing, two long-time applied science leaders, the incentives for research scientists are the same as they are for those at Facebook. Employee-scientists at all three companies hope to produce research that directly informs product development and leads to revenue. However, the outcomes of their research are very different. When Boeing does research, it contributes to humanity’s ability to fly. When Facebook does research, it serves its own ideological agenda and perpetuates Facebooky-ness.

Facebook is now more forthright about this. In a response to the recent controversy, Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer wrote, “The goal of all of our research at Facebook is to learn how to provide a better service…We were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook. We didn’t clearly state our motivations in the paper.”

Facebook’s former head of data science Cameron Marlow offers, “Our goal is not to change the pattern of communication in society. Our goal is to understand it so we can adapt our platform to give people the experience that they want.”

But data scientists don’t just produce knowledge about observable, naturally occurring phenomena; they shape outcomes. A/B testing and routinized experimentation in real time are done on just about every major website in order to optimize for certain desired behaviors and interactions. Google designers infamously tested up to 40 shades of blue. Facebook has already experimented with the effects of social pressure in getting-out-the-vote, raising concerns about selective digital gerrymandering. What might Facebook do with its version of this research? Perhaps it could design the News Feed to show us positive posts from our friends in order to make us happier and encourage us to spend more time on the site? Or might Facebook show us more sad posts, encouraging us to spend more time on the site because we have more to complain about?

Should we think of commercial data science as science? When we conflate the two, we assume companies are accountable for producing generalizable knowledge and we risk according their findings undue weight and authority. Yet when we don’t, we risk absolving practitioners from the rigor and ethical review that grants authority and power to scientific knowledge.

Facebook has published a paper in an attempt to contribute to the larger body of social science knowledge. But researchers today cannot possibly replicate Facebook’s experiment without Facebook’s cooperation. The worst outcome of this debacle would be for Facebook to retreat and avoid further public relations fiascos by keeping all its data science research findings internal. Instead, if companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter are to support an open stance toward contributing knowledge, we need researchers with non-commercial interests who can run and replicate this research outside of the platform’s influence.

Facebook sees its users not as a population of human subjects, but as a consumer public. Therefore, we—that public and those subjects—must ask the bigger questions. What are the claims that data science makes both in industry and academia? What do they say about the kinds of knowledge that our society values?

We need to be more critical of the production of data science, especially in commercial settings. The firms that use our data have asymmetric power over us. We do them a favor unquestioningly accepting their claims to the prestige, expertise, and authority of science as well.

Ultimately, society’s greatest concerns with science and technology are ethical: Do we accept or reject the means by which knowledge is produced and the ends to which it is applied? It’s a question we ask of nuclear physics, genetic modification—and one we should ask of data science.

Big Data may not be much to look at, but it can be powerful stuff. For instance, this is what the new National Security Agency (NSA) data center in Bluffdale, Utah, looks like.

George Frey/Getty Images

New technologies are not all equal. Some do nothing more than add a thin extra layer to the top-soil of human behavior (i.e., Teflon and the invention of non-stick frying pans). Some technologies, however, dig deeper, uprooting the norms of human behavior and replacing them with wholly new possibilities. For the last few months I have been arguing that Big Data — the machine-based collection and analysis of astronomical quantities of information — represents such a turn. And, for the most part, I have painted this transformation in a positive light. But last week’s revelations about the NSA’s PRISM program have put the potential dangers of Big Data front and center. So, let’s take a peek at Big Data’s dark side.

The central premise of Big Data is that all the digital breadcrumbs we leave behind as we go about our everyday lives create a trail of behavior that can be followed, captured, stored and “mined” en-mass, providing the miners with fundamental insights into both our personal and collective behavior.

The initial “ick” factor from Big Data is the loss of privacy, as pretty much every aspect of your life (location records via mobile phones, purchases via credit cards, interests via web-surfing behavior) has been recorded — and, possibly, shared — by some entity somewhere. Big Data moves from “ick” to potentially harmful when all of those breadcrumbs are thrown in a machine for processing.

This is the “data-mining” part of Big Data and it happens when algorithms are used to search for statistical correlations between one kind of behavior and another. This is where things can get really tricky and really scary.

Consider, for example, the age-old activity of securing a loan. Back in the day you went to a bank and they looked at your application, the market and your credit history. Then they said “yes” or “no.” End of story. In the world of Big Data, banks now have more ways to assess your credit worthiness.

“We feel like all data is credit data,” former Google CIO Douglas Merrill said last year in The New York Times. “We just don’t know how to use it yet.” Merrill is CEO of ZestCash, one of a host of start-up companies using information from sources such as social networks to determine the probability that an applicant will repay their loan.

Your contacts on LinkedIn can be used to assess your “character and capacity” when it comes to loans. Facebook friends can also be useful. Have rich friends? That’s good. Know some deadbeats, not so much. Companies will argue they are only trying to sort out the good applicants from the bad. But there is also a real risk that you will be unfairly swept into an algorithm’s dead zone and disqualified from a loan, with devastating consequences for your life.

Jay Stanley of the ACLU says being judged based on the actions of others is not limited to your social networks:

Credit card companies sometimes lower a customer’s credit limitbased on the repayment history of the other customers of stores where a person shops. Such “behavioral scoring” is a form of economic guilt-by-association based on making statistical inferences about a person that go far beyond anything that person can control or be aware of.

The link between behavior, health and health insurance is another gray (or dark) area for Big Data. Consider the case of Walter and Paula Shelton of Gilbert, Louisiana. Back in 2008, Business Weekreported how the Sheltons were denied health insurance when records of their prescription drug purchases were pulled. Even though their blood pressure and anti-depression medications were for relatively minor conditions, the Sheltons had fallen into another algorithmic dead zone in which certain kinds of purchases trigger red flags that lead to denial of coverage.

Since 2008 the use of Big Data by the insurance industry has only become more entrenched. As The Wall Street Journal reports:

Companies also have started scrutinizing employees’ other behavior more discreetly. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina recently began buying spending data on more than 3 million people in its employer group plans. If someone, say, purchases plus-size clothing, the health plan could flag him for potential obesity—and then call or send mailings offering weight-loss solutions.

Of course no one will argue with helping folks get healthier. But with insurance costs dominating company spreadsheets, it’s not hard to imagine how that data about plus-size purchases might someday factor into employment decisions.

And then there’s the government’s use, or misuse, of Big Data. For years critics have pointed to no-fly lists as an example of where Big Data can go wrong.

No-fly lists are meant to keep people who might be terrorists off of planes. It has long been assumed that data harvesting and mining are part of the process for determining who is on a no-fly list. So far, so good.

But the stories of folks unfairly listed are manifold: everything from disabled Marine Corps veterans to (at one point) the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. Because the methods used in placing people on the list are secret, getting off the list can, according to Connor Freidersdorf of The Atlantic, be a Kafka-esque exercise in frustration.

A 2008 National Academy of Sciences report exploring the use of Big Data techniques for national security made the dangers explicit:

The rich digital record that is made of people’s lives today provides many benefits to most people in the course of everyday life. Such data may also have utility for counterterrorist and law enforcement efforts. However, the use of such data for these purposes also raises concerns about the protection of privacy and civil liberties. Improperly used, programs that do not explicitly protect the rights of innocent individuals are likely to create second-class citizens whose freedoms to travel, engage in commercial transactions, communicate, and practice certain trades will be curtailed—and under some circumstances, they could even be improperly jailed.

So where do we go from here?

From credit to health insurance to national security, the technologies of Big Data raise real concerns about far more than just privacy (though those privacy concerns are real, legitimate and pretty scary). The debate opening up before us is an essential one for a culture dominated by science and technology.

Who decides how we go forward? Who determines if a technology is adopted? Who determines when and how it will be deployed? Who has the rights to your data? Who speaks for us? How do we speak for ourselves?

At Beatrix we love productivity. Perhaps even more than we love chocolate. Wait, that’s just silly – chocolate rules all. That said, here’s 50 tips you can use to enhance your productivity. Try some out and rock on!

1. Learn to say NO

Deciding what is and isn’t important is one skill. But having the guts to say NO when you know something isn’t important or is disruptive to your flow, is quite another. Learn it.

2. Take public transport

Ditch the fancy car – take the bus or the train. Your mind will be free to get things done during your commute. You can get a head-start on emails, plan your todos or even do actual work if there’s enough space.

3. Listen to educational podcasts while you commute

Or use that time to enhance your mind! Learn a language or other new skill through your headphones – all while everyone else on the train is listening to Justin Bieber or morning radio. Intellectual smug face optional.

4. Try to live central to the things important to you

If you find yourself hanging out in a particular part of town often, try to live somewhere equidistant between there and work. Sounds simple, but it will hugely cut down on your time spent on transport.

5. Work from home

Figure out what tasks can be done at home and convince your boss it can be done. Free from the distraction of coworkers, meetings, long lunches, commutes – you’ll be more productive than ever.

6. Use website-blocking software

Website blockers like StayFocusd can give you a virtual slap on the wrist every time you try to access Facebook or Reddit while working. Over time, they can build a good habit of not checking social media while working.

7. Prioritize effectively

Decide what is the most important thing you need to do that day and do it first.

8. Be goal orientated rather than follow a todo list

Todo lists are useful but they can either become unwieldy or you can forget to update them with new tasks. Think about goals rather than specific todos and aim to complete them.

9. Make a “leave the house” mixtape

Know you need 30 mins in the morning to get ready? Make a 30 min mixtape and aim to leave before the last song plays. It’s a neat psychological trick!

10. Use the Seinfeld X technique

When asked how did he get so good at stand up, Seinfeld revealed his method for making sure he practiced every day. Every day he practiced, he put a red X in the calendar. After a week of Xs it was so satisfying to see, that he didn’t want to break the chain. Practice makes perfect and figuring out a hack that can keep you at it, is half the battle.

11. OHIO

Only Handle It Once. If you receive an email and can reply to it quickly, reply right away. Reason being, if you leave it until later, the time spent replying plus the time spent remembering over and over that you need to reply (and delegating it until later) ends up being much more than if you just replied to the email right away.

12. Make time to exercise

Release some endorphins – they are great for the mind! Exercise will help you to focus when you need to. Plus it’s also, you know, good for your body.

13. Create rock solid deadlines

Nothing will spur you into action more than a seemingly insurmountable challenge, and an ever-advancing date in the calendar when it all has to be completed.

14. Learn how to create tasks

“Lose weight” isn’t a task. It’s a goal that has many tasks associated with it. Split goals into clear, concise tasks.

15. Turn your desk/walls into a whiteboard

Having informal space to doodle thoughts is great for capturing ideas and flashes of brilliance – or impromptu collaboration.

16. Eliminate bad habits

You know all those time-wasting things you do? Stop doing them. There that was easy.

17. Meditate

Here’s a simple breathing exercise that will help you focus. Breathe in while counting to 3, breathe out while counting to 4. Repeat for a minute or so until relaxed and focused.

18. Batch mundane tasks

By nature we tend to drag out mundane tasks. Batch them together to spend less time on them, leaving more time for tasks we enjoy.

19. Use virtual assistants

Waiting on hold is a waste of time – luckily there are services like Lucyphone who can do the waiting for you.

20. No meeting Wednesdays

At Asana, Dustin Moskovitz employs a “no meeting Wednesday” rule, meaning that the entire company knows wednesdays are for glorious, uninterrupted work.

21. Sleep early

Your mind can’t function properly if you’re tired. Sleep early so you’re not tired during the day when you need your brain performing optimally.

22. Start work early and work fewer hours

The morning hours are great for productivity. At 6am, there’s not many other people up, you’ll be relatively free from distractions and your mind is fresh from resting. You can pack a full day of work into just 3 hours from 6am to 9am. Try it.

23. Learn the Pomodoro Technique

In a nutshell: Decide on a task. Set a timer for 25 mins. Focus and work as hard as possible. When the timer goes off, take a break for 5 minutes. Repeat the process, taking a longer 15-30 minute break every few cycles.

24. Get a second monitor

Not having to switch or rearrange windows can give a serious productivity boost – and monitors these days are pretty cheap.

25. Carry a random report

A bit of social hackery. If you work in an office, carry around random, important-looking bits of paper. People will be less likely to hassle you or drag you into an impromptu meeting if you walk with the hustle of a Very Busy Persom (TM).

26. Get a life outside of work / the web

De-stressing is important, and it’s equally important to de-stress away from the internet. Go and take up a sport or a craft to feed your brain. Variety is important.

27. The Two Minute Rule

If something can be done in 2 minutes, do it right away. If not, leave until an appropriate later timeslot.

28. Learn about sleep cycles

The body sleeps in cycles of 90 minutes. If you’ve ever woken up feeling groggy for much of the day, you might have woken up in the middle of a sleep cycle – it’s best for the body if you wake up at the end of a cycle.

29. Install Inbox Pause

Here’s a handy Gmail plugin that simply pauses all incoming mail (it goes into a special inbox) until you are ready to receive them again.

30. Install Boomerang

Here’s another handy Gmail plugin that lets you schedule emails to be sent. Often we may write an email at night but know that the optimal time to send it is in the morning. You can either send it now at a suboptimal time, or you have to remind yourself to send it in the morning. Or you can just get Boomerang to schedule it for you!

31. Don’t think about time

Don’t sit on the train thinking about how long it’s taking. This will exhaust you. Use the time more wisely – occupy your mind by thinking about your todos, or listening to something useful.

32. Establish an ending time to your work day

Having a strict deadline for when your work day ends will increase productivity as you strive to get more done before you leave.

33. Experiment with a change of location

Feed the mind – the same working environment month after month can erode your productivity. Mix things up, get out of your comfort zone and maybe become a road warrior for a while. If your boss won’t let you work from an idyllic tropical beach location, see if your company will let your team head to a cafe to work for a day.

34. Disable phone notifications

Those flashing popups can be a huge distraction – disable them when you need to focus.

35. Focus on 3 priorities a day

There’s something magic about the No. 3. Try to achieve 3 goals per day. No more, no less.

36. Listen to appropriate music

This will be different for everyone, but there’s music that helps you focus and there’s music that’s distracting as everyone starts singing along to Baby Got Back blasting from the office stereo.

37. Work with a friend who is also working

Nothing says “stop procrastinating now” more than staring in the face of a buddy who is crushing it and focusing 100% on their work.

38. Take walking meetings

Kill 2 birds (or more, kill all the birds!) with one stone – get out of the office, change your environment, and set a psychological deadline for meetings by taking “walking meetings” round the block or round a nearby park.

39. Learn less, do more

Put that theory into practice – your brain wants to learn from experience and will function much better from doing so.

40. Rest if you need to

It’s ok to rest. In fact it’s ok to rest a lot. One habit of highly productive people is that they are not functioning at 100% productivity every day. You’ll just burn out that way. Take days off to recharge.

41. Store files in the cloud

Use Google Drive or Dropbox to save yourself from getting into a faff when sending clients the latest version of files, or switching computers.

42. Airplane mode

An easy way to disable all distracting incoming notifications? Switch your phone to airplane mode.

43. Declutter your work space

Tidy desk, tidy mind. Also more space for you to scribble on (if you’ve converted it into a whiteboard from the previous point).

44. Learn regex

Regex is like voodoo for text manipulation. Ever been asked to do something like “here’s a list of 200 bullet points… can you put curly quotes around all of them?”. Doing that by hand would be a mundane task that you’d drag out all day. Doing it with regex would take about 10 seconds.

45. Don’t multitask

You are not a computer. Focus on one task at a time.

46. Do something mundane at the start of the day

Get your brain into “work mode” by doing something easy and repetitive at the start of the day, like washing the dishes.

47. Leave 10 mins per hour for email

Don’t let email eat into your productivity. A good rule of thumb is 10 minutes per hour for checking and replying to emails.

48. Turn your phone face down

An even more ghetto trick to avoid phone notification distractions – just turn it face down (and on silent, obviously).

49. Flip a coin

If indecisiveness is causing bad productivity, flip a coin, decide, and get on with it.

50. Work on something you’re passionate about

Perhaps the most important productivity hack of all. If you’re working on something you’re passionate about, you’ll already be automatically inclined to focus on it and give it your all – the time you spend on something you’re passionate about will be worth 10x the time spent on something you’re not passionate about. Don’t waste your time, we only have a limited amount! Use it on the things you love to do.

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the agency’s arguments that its protocols surrounding an Internet kill switch were exempt from public disclosure and ordered the agency to release the records in 30 days. However, the court left the door open for the agency to appeal the ruling.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is seeking “Standard Operating Procedure 303,” also known as the “Internet kill switch” from Homeland Security. The protocols govern shutting down wireless networks to prevent the remote detonation of bombs.

The broad government power to shut down communications networks worries civil libertarians. However, the agency argues the protocols must be kept secret to protect national interests and the safety of individuals.

EPIC filed a FOIA request for the protocols in July 2012. The Department of Homeland Security originally said it could not find any records on the kill switch.

After EPIC appealed, the agency located the protocol, but redacted nearly all of the information. The agency cited exemptions that allow the withholding of information that could “disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions” or “could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual.”

The court said Homeland Security wrongly claimed that it could withhold Standard Operating Procedure 303 as a “technique for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions.”

The court also found that interpreting a safety exemption to “encompass possible harm to anyone anywhere in the United States within the blast radius of a hypothetical unexploded bomb also flies in the face of repeated Supreme Court direction to read FOIA exemptions narrowly.”

While the court rejected the agency’s broad interpretation of FOIA exemptions, it left the door open for further appeals by Homeland Security. The agency has 30 days to release the protocols to EPIC, but the court issued a 30-day additional stay on its opinion to allow the agency time to appeal.

• CJ Ciaramella is a staff writer for the Washington Free Beacon. His Twitter handle is @cjciaramella. His email address is ciaramella@freebeacon.com.

Listen up, I feel bad that most people in my age group really don’t have a clue what a Bitcoin is. Luckily for you, I care enough to provide this link that explains the concept of a Bitcoin. This is the start of something we will experience more of in the near future.

You’re probably wondering why hek this is even relevant or important to us to know of Bitcoin? Well fact to the matter is that technology is ever advancing and changing the mechanics of the world we live in. Bitcoin is an Internet money that gives us a new way of thinking the way we work with currency and make transactions.